Marathon game becomes a crucial bet for Bungie and Sony to revive online services strategy amid challenges

Destiny 2’s recent final update, called Monument of Triumph, marked the end of live content additions to the game and put Bungie and Sony in a challenging scenario. With Sony’s gradual withdrawal from the franchise and the obstacles faced by the studio, there is enormous pressure for the Marathon game to achieve the desired success in the market.

The scenario is critical because Bungie has no other game projects approved for its developers at the moment. The end of support for Destiny 2 could trigger a wave of large-scale layoffs if the new title doesn’t pay off. Although many employees have already been reassigned to the Marathon team, the project has faced considerable disadvantages since the beginning.

Audience imbalance between PC and consoles

There has been much discussion about how the latest update has boosted Destiny 2’s user numbers, surpassing Marathon’s all-time highs on the Steam platform. However, this comparison is skewed as the Destiny 2 update was free. It’s natural that the final chapter of an eleven-year-old game, with thousands of hours dedicated by fans, would attract a significant mass of players.

In fact, Destiny 2 has been outperforming Marathon for some time now, and Steam’s metrics don’t reveal the full picture. Even with similar visible numbers on the computer, Destiny 2 has a player base on consoles that is four times larger than that of PC. Marathon has a two-to-one ratio in favor of computers, which further accentuates the imbalance between the titles.

High cost of Destiny 3 made sequel unfeasible

This situation has generated considerable discontent among Destiny fans, who believe that the game has been discontinued in favor of Marathon. While redirection of resources is a factor, the issue is more complex. Destiny 2 is an expensive game to maintain due to the vast volume of content it releases and, if the frequency of updates decreases, the player base tends to abandon the title.

Furthermore, the expectation for a long-awaited sequel, Destiny 3, could cost up to US$500 million (around R$2.7 billion), according to market estimates. This value reflects the rising costs of today’s gaming industry. Marathon, although not a cheap project, will require less investment to maintain than a game focused on constant story expansions, making it a strategically more viable alternative in the context of high development costs.

Marathon becomes a pillar of Sony’s service games

With the closure of Destiny 2, Marathon takes over as Sony’s most prominent online service game. The Japanese company has canceled or shelved several other similar projects from its internal studios in recent years, and hits like Helldivers 2 were developed in partnership with external studios (Arrowhead).

This situation puts enormous pressure on Marathon to revitalize Sony’s troubled online service gaming division. Bungie’s future as an independent studio within the group appears to depend directly on the commercial performance of this title.

Second season fails to recover audiences

The big challenge lies in attracting and keeping the player base active. Marathon performed below expectations upon launch and the situation has not improved since. This became even more evident last week, which marked the launch of the second season, with several improvements, and the extension of a free trial week to ten days, which recently ended.

The results were not encouraging. Even with the combination of these initiatives, the recent launch of Marathon failed to reach even half the peak of its original (paid) launch, and the number of players registered a drop over the weekend, instead of the increase expected with the free access period. At the end of the free week, the game accumulated a decrease of more than 50% compared to the beginning of the period.

Bungie changes strategy and bets on PvE mode

It is imperative that Marathon can improve its player numbers. To achieve this, several strategies are being implemented by the studio, such as accelerating progression and initiatives to attract new players, although this has resulted in high-level players acquiring powerful equipment almost instantly.

Bungie is also experimenting with free kit modes, where players face virtually zero risk in Extraction mode, and recently launched a PvE (player versus environment) mode, which wasn’t originally planned for Season Two. The current plan aims to expand Marathon’s vision to include diverse audience profiles, although this is a long-term initiative that represents a significant reorientation of the original project.

Since the last financial report, Sony has shown public support for Marathon, even as it continues to post hundreds of millions of dollars in losses with Bungie. The game is not in imminent danger of being cancelled, but the performance demands are heavy. As a much more niche title than Destiny, this situation points to a failure in strategic planning on Sony’s part, and Bungie is now faced with the task of making Marathon more popular than it had ever initially anticipated.